Riley Gaines, center left, a former collegiate swimmer in favor of a bill restricting trans girls from competing in girls sports, took a picture with a supporter on the steps of the Capitol in St. Paul on March 3. (Richard Tsong-Taatariii/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

On the day they would vote to ban trans girls from youth sports, many Minnesota female Republican lawmakers wore pink, the color associated with demure femininity, baby girls and delicate flowers.

Their business of the day: Protecting female athletes aged 5-18 from the scourge of competing against transgender girls on school sports teams. By pursuing the measure, the GOP wasted valuable time, squandered goodwill and most significantly risked ostracizing and further threatening the mental health of children who need our protection.

To no one’s surprise, the bill failed in the House where Republicans have a 67-66 edge. From the DFLers, the Republicans needed a single vote to reach the threshold of 68 for passage. They couldn’t get one.

DFL Floor Leader Jamie Long of Minneapolis summed the proceedings with a floor speech, saying, “It’s hard to think of an uglier bill than the one we have before us today.”

With their hard-won majority, Republicans could have brought to the floor bills to improve the lives of young girls and women. They might have addressed the soaring costs of housing, child care and food. They could have protected funding for education, health care and extracurricular programs, which are imperiled because of President Donald Trump’s budget cuts.

Instead, the GOP sought to score political points on the backs of children already at risk of being excluded and demonized for not fitting into someone’s inflexible notion of gender and femininity.

The Preserving Girls’ Sports Act was sponsored by Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover. It sought to limit participation on girls’ elementary or secondary school sports teams to females as defined by their reproductive system. (The bill is alive; Republicans can bring it up and pass it if they win a Roseville-area special election next week.)

Scott’s plan would put the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) in charge of sex checks on athletes deemed to be of suspiciously high athletic prowess or questionable femininity.

A doctor’s exam would settle the issue or, alternatively, Scott said, a buccal swab of DNA from a child’s mouth.

This would be a new role for the league which currently doesn’t require schools to report whether children play on teams that are inconsistent with the gender they were assigned at birth. In other words, the league isn’t tracking how many trans girls are currently playing on sports teams nor did it bring the issue to the Legislature as a problem.

In her comments, Scott said she has a recently acquired a new friend, a young female swimmer who hopes to qualify for the state high school swim meet. That swimmer, Scott said, lives in fear that she might, at the pivotal qualifying meet, encounter a transgender female swimmer who beats her in the pool and steals her spot at state.

The hypothetical was quickly rebutted.

“You have invented a threat and you have alienated children,” state Rep. Leigh Finke said in her floor speech. Finke, DFL-St. Paul, is the state’s first transgender legislator.

Finke correctly pointed out that after same-sex marriage was legalized and widely accepted, conservative Republicans went in search of a new population to demonize in order to whip up votes.

They found transgender athletes and sports to be a winning combo. A New York Times/Ipsos poll in January found that 67% of Democrats and 94% of Republicans believe transgender women should be barred from competing against other women.

They were speaking of adult women so let’s talk about college athletics. Of more than half a million NCAA athletes, fewer than 10 identify as transgender. And yet President Donald Trump already has directed the NCAA to keep transgender women out of women’s sports.

It does sound demoralizing and unfair to have men snapping up all the medals and records in women’s and girls’ sports. No argument there. But the truth of the matter: It’s simply not happening.

What’s more, athletes come to sports with far greater physical, mental and socioeconomic advantages than gender confers. The best swimmers are tall and lean while the best gymnasts are petite. Kids from wealthier backgrounds have parents with the time, money and savvy to tend to their athletic careers. Those are the biological and social metrics that matter.

Even Riley Gaines, who parlayed a decent but unremarkable collegiate swimming career into a profitable career as an anti-trans crusader, was only marginally harmed by having to compete against a transgender woman in her final collegiate race in 2022. She tied for fifth at nationals in the 200 freestyle with Lia Thomas. The incident catapulted Gaines to her current gig at the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit created to advance Trump’s agenda.

In her brief remarks on the Minnesota Capitol steps Monday, Gaines decried the heavy security she claims she needs “for saying something as simple as men and women are different.”

Girls and women’s sports face threats, but not from an onslaught of transgender athletes. I’d love to see Gaines talk to kids about the benefits of competitive swimming, such as mental toughness, physical endurance and long-term friendships.

Decades from now, her medals and trophies will sprout mold or get lost, but the toughness and the friendships will remain. All kids deserve the same, including transgender girls.